Some day I will write a post on (my) disability; in the meantime I will say it’s funny having undiagnosed learning disabilities while also being viewed as too smart to struggle. (Here, funny means terrible.) One of the many consequences is that I have a distorted view of what regular people should know and what they do know.
I feel entirely unqualified to write about fascism!
I’m going to persevere though because of a magical word called praxis (the process of doing the thing, instead of just blabbing on about it).
Just to clear the air, I am not here to define fascism, to prove that what I call fascist is fascist, or to prove any points really. This is not a debate; this is a work of art. If my self-expression informs you, great! If it makes you angry, yikes! I’m not for you! Please, please just move on.
At this point I am going to appeal to an outside source: The Fascism Barometer. You don’t have to click on that, but if anything I’m saying makes you uncomfy, that website might help you believe I am not entirely making everything up.
It doesn’t even matter what fascism is!
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned of late is that Nothing Matters (Literally)! Adults have never known what they were doing! There are no rules! Everyone is making everything up and most people aren’t great at it either!!
When you say, for example, “Donald Trump is a fascist” or “Elon Musk is a Nazi,” someone is likely to jump out of the nearest woodwork or shrubbery and offer a technical correction or ask you to explain any number of distinctions between Musk/Trump and Hitler. For decades, those people held sway over me, not because they were correct or moral, but because I had been conditioned to expect scrutiny against which I would absolutely be required to defend myself. I now understand that the purpose of that scrutiny was to keep order, regardless of whom it hurt. Guess who loves violently imposed order? Fascists!
If you are like me and know Hitler was bad but don’t know the details of how he came to power, or how he killed millions and millions of people, it is easy to believe that the differences between Musk/Trump and Hitler matter. Fun fact: they don’t!
The only good thing about Nazis is you should always run them over with the trolley.
What you should take away from even a very incomplete understanding of Nazi Germany is that it should have been stopped; every Nazi should have been stopped; every person who complied should have been stopped. And most importantly, they should have been stopped Before They Did All The Evil!!!! As in, they needed to be treated as seriously as mass murderers before they committed any murders.
When you can’t count on hindsight to spot a movement towards mass death, you need something to look for. Let’s call that fascism! Hitler did a lot of fascist things (historians, I am so sorry, feel free to comment with information) in the lead up to the Holocaust. Have you noticed any of these things happening in the United States?
What matters (in terms of watching out for fascism)?
What matters is democracy. Now, some of you have rolled your eyes and some of you are nodding excitedly. These are both valid reactions. American democracy is a myth. American democracy has never existed –it may never exist– but it is a myth that has been in contention its entire existence. Whether you believe in a hopeful possibility of participating in an American democracy (a complicated question for many forced into citizenship), the system that passes for democracy in the US is one of our limited protections against the white supremacist losers who fight hardest against real democracy.
There is a playbook to destroying democracy from within. Trump is following that playbook. Watch out for illegal and unconstitutional orders. Watch out for scapegoating. Watch out for power consolidation. Watch out for placing loyal followers in positions of power. Watch for the stripping away of rights and protections. Watch for system overwhelm. Once you believe what is happening, though, you’ll want to be careful about what and how you watch. The overwhelm is real. This post is part 1 because this is all stuff I am learning right now. We are posting through it, sweeties.
What matters (actually)?
What matters is the people. There’s this saying you’ll hear a lot amongst progressives and leftists following the news and it’s “people are going to die.” It’s not a particularly uplifting saying, but it has the benefit of being true. The problem with fascism is all the death, and also the lack of freedom. In the United States, we are used to death. In the sense that we are used to death being a hidden cost, happening elsewhere (and elsewhen) to other people (elsewhom?), nothing to worry about, but definitely part of why we have nice things. That is working to Trump’s advantage. Trump and Musk are going to get people killed; it has already started.
What matters is the trans people whose existence is being erased, denied, and criminalized. What matters is the people of color (immigrants, undocumented immigrants, Native Americans???) who are being threatened, detained, deported, or just dumped in other countries??. What matters is the children being denied life saving care. What matters is disabled people who are being erased without much fuss being made. What matters is the students and faculty who have been punished for supporting academic freedom (the freedom Palestinians should have to go to school), who now face even worse treatment. What matters is jobs lost, income lost, healthcare lost. What matters is not being able to get access to medicines and vaccines. What matters is that everything touched by the federal government by law or by convenience is dissolving into shambles that benefit Trump and Musk and their loyalists (as long as they don’t need help) and nobody else. Nazis kill; it’s their thing. Project 2025 kills. Intentionally. That’s what happens when you revoke protections and codify discrimination. People die.
America was founded on killing; in many ways what’s happening now is the story of the US. Remove people who call into question America’s greatness, while extracting said greatness from the labor of exploited people denied rights and agency on manufactured grounds.
But the story of America is also one of sustained resistance. America is thousands of stories of resistance and reawakening and that doesn’t make it good, but we need to know that the only thing as persistent and adaptive as white supremacy is the people and stories it is desperate to erase.
Commit to being anti-fascist. Commit to holding true to morals and standards that are stronger than any rich man’s so-called authority. This is what matters now. We are what matters now.